By: Louis Petree, Culture & Arts Correspondent

The first thing you notice when you step into 7EVEN’s new collection, Dead Foodie: The Last Supper Club, is hunger. Not the kind that gnaws at your stomach, but the kind that lives in the imagination — appetite as metaphor, craving as philosophy. These aren’t paintings about food, at least not in any literal sense. They are about the places where taste collides with memory, where ritual collides with rebellion, and where even the most ordinary dish can become an altar.

7EVEN, the masked artist who has built an international reputation on audacity and mystery, has always been drawn to ritual. In earlier collections, ritual was expressed through color and chaos, symbolic storytelling, and painterly gestures that felt as personal as diary entries. But with Dead Foodie, ritual takes the shape of a meal — a seven-course feast where each dish is plated not on porcelain but on canvas. The conceit is playful, even mischievous: a supper club where no one eats, yet everyone is nourished.

The work unfolds as a tasting menu of seven paintings. Each is introduced as though it were a course — with titles like Slice of the Afterlife and Forbidden Dessert — and each pushes the boundaries of what food, or art, can mean. It is both tongue-in-cheek and deadly serious, offering a critique of culture’s obsession with consumption while simultaneously reveling in its seductions.

The First Bite: Slice of the Afterlife

The opener, Slice of the Afterlife, is a pizza — but not the pizza you remember from childhood sleepovers or greasy boxes stacked after midnight. This one glows. Its toppings shimmer like stained glass, its crust flickers with ghostly light. It’s comfort food reanimated, a séance in sauce and dough.

In many ways, it sets the tone for the entire collection. 7EVEN has often spoken about the idea of art as resurrection — not of bodies, but of feelings. Here, the artist takes something familiar, almost banal, and revives it. We all think we know pizza. But in this canvas, pizza becomes a portal.

Pour Me Eternity

If the first course is playful, the second is pure decadence. Pour Me Eternity is a portrait of a wine glass filled with a liquid that no vineyard on Earth could claim. It is crimson and gold, swirling with mystery. The sommelier who pours it is faceless, white-gloved, as if luxury itself has become the servant.

Luxury, in 7EVEN’s hands, is never innocent. It is rebellion disguised as ritual. Wine, the most coded of cultural beverages, is no longer about terroir or prestige. It is about stepping outside the rules of taste. This is not Napa, nor is it Bordeaux. This is wine from nowhere, and therefore, from everywhere.

Kitchen Saints

Perhaps the most personal of the seven, Kitchen Saints pulls us into the myth of “Mom and Pop” as culinary alchemists. The painting is both tender and irreverent—pots bubble. Aromas seem to rise off the surface. Yet the figures are shrouded, half-divine, half-domestic, as if ordinary parents could also be gods when they step into the kitchen.

Here, 7EVEN seems to honor the unsung saints of flavor — the family cooks, the recipe keepers, the backroom magicians who make food taste like home. In a supper club full of theatrics, this is the course that feels like a prayer.

Leilani’s First Bite

This course is the oddest, and the most moving. Leilani’s First Bite is a dog’s dish. A gleaming silver bowl. A canine gourmand. The moment when the old diet dies and a new appetite begins.

At first, it seems almost humorous — what is a dog doing in a high-concept meal? But linger longer and it becomes something else: a parable about new beginnings, about the courage to abandon what fed you once and to taste something riskier, stranger, more alive. It is, in its way, the most human of the seven.

Forbidden Dessert

Dessert, in Western dining rituals, is indulgence distilled. But 7EVEN’s Forbidden Dessert is less indulgence than confrontation. The sweet arrives under a silver cloche, but when the lid lifts, what lies beneath should not exist: colors too bright, textures too impossible, shapes that teeter between delicious and monstrous.

This is the dare of decadence. We want it because it is beautiful. We fear it because it is unnatural. It is the course that asks the viewer: How far will you go for pleasure? At what point does sweetness become dangerous?

Midnight Market

If dessert is intimacy, then Midnight Market is theater. Neon lights, whispered deals, rare ingredients passed hand to hand beneath the shadow of midnight. The canvas vibrates with energy, part street bazaar, part fever dream.

This is where global food culture comes into play — the endless quest for the next ingredient, the next flavor, the next thrill. It is a painting about capitalism, yes, but also about desire. We are all hunters in the dark, searching for something that will change the way we taste.

Table 7even

The final course is silence. Table 7even is nothing but an empty chair, a single place setting, waiting—no food, no flavor, just the absence that becomes an invitation.

It is the perfect closing note. After all the spectacle, all the shimmer and indulgence, what remains is the viewer. Will you sit down? Will you join the club? In that moment, art and appetite become the same thing: a hunger for presence, for participation, for connection.

Appetite as Artform

Taken together, the seven courses form a meditation on appetite itself — not just for food, but for novelty, for risk, for memory, for the sacred and the profane.

What makes Dead Foodie remarkable is its refusal to treat food as mere metaphor. Instead, it treats metaphor as food. Each painting is plated like a dish, each dish seasoned with a story. And while you cannot eat them, you leave the gallery feeling strangely full.

7EVEN’s work has always been global, spanning galleries in New York, Venice, Miami, and Barcelona. The Last Supper Club is no exception. It will debut in Laguna Beach before traveling to a dozen cities worldwide, from Paris to Tokyo to Honolulu. At each stop, like each course, a new layer will be added to the feast.

Reviving Pleasure

In interviews, 7EVEN has described the project in disarmingly simple terms: “We’ve all become jaded diners in a world of endless menus. Dead Foodie isn’t about killing pleasure — it’s about reviving it.”

That sentiment may be the key to unlocking the collection’s heart. In an era where culture is overwhelmed with choices — infinite menus, infinite options — pleasure itself begins to dull. We scroll, we sample, we discard. What Dead Foodie does is force us to stop, sit down, and taste again.

The Last Supper Club isn’t about food. It’s about appetite, and what it means to be hungry in a world that feeds us endlessly but rarely satisfies.

And that is the paradox 7EVEN offers his diners: in art, as in food, we may never be full — but we will always crave the next bite.